Don’t do anything in front of your husband that you wouldn’t do in front of a guest (pick your nose, pass gas, adjust your nylons, pick a wedgie, adjust your bra, use the restroom, etc.). Yes, he will see you get dressed in the morning, which a guest would not see, but be careful to never get so “comfortable” with him, that you show him your grosser actions.

If you managed to behave well before you married him, you can keep it up. To violate this, diminishes you in his eyes, and frankly, diminishes him in yours. If you act better in front of strange men than you do your husband, you will eventually respect them more than you respect your husband.

By the same token, try not to talk in detail about your period or other bodily functions unless you absolutely have to. It isn’t that you are ashamed or your body, it’s just that he really doesn’t want to hear about it, and frankly, by being a little discrete you can transform some rather base aspects of being human into just another element to your feminine mystery.

Familiarity breeds contempt. Discretion enhances the sense of mystique, the strange and marvelous feminine mysteries that a men don’t really understand.

Don’t take him with you for advice when you are getting fitted for a bra. Don’t let him see all the little steps that go into the finished product. Not that you can’t ever groom yourself with him in the room, just be mindful of what you are displaying. Putting on a spritz of perfume while he watches, can be alluring. Putting on control top pantyhose? Not so much. If it isn’t an attractive step, very discretely work things around so that you are in private when you get to that part. Don’t be obvious that you are shutting him out, just engineer it so that he isn’t there for those things.

Also by not doing something things around him, he is never confronted with the fact that you aren’t naturally the way you appear in the end. Of course he knows that your eyebrows aren’t naturally perfect, your nails naturally shaped and polished, your armpits naturally hairless (now shaving your legs can be rather sexy, but it is harder to shave your pits in a sexy fashion), and your teeth clean and white. His head knows these things, but until he is confronted with the process of how it becomes that way, it is still a bit of a mystery.

Have you ever been fascinated by something, and then learned about how it was done or made, and then it lost all its mystery? Why do we buy fancy products when we have simple ingredients around the house which are not only cheaper, but often work better? There is a fascination to a fancy package, a promise, an alluring name, and contents that you don’t quite fully understand. While this can work against us with household products, you can put this phenomenon to work for you with your personal habits.

In the same vein, there are some unbecoming jobs that are necessary for daily life. It’s not the end of the world if her sees you do them, but by connecting yourself with them, you slightly diminish yourself. It doesn’t paint you in the most flattering light for him to see you cleaning the toilet or scrubbing the kitchen floor. It’s not a big deal, but if you can find ways to do those less attractive tasks when he isn’t around, do it.

Now if he does see something you would rather have concealed (which he inevitably will from time to time), don’t get flustered or embarrassed. Don’t push him out of the room or try to hide. Be poised, be collected, be graceful, and discretely put aside what you are doing and move to something else. Try not to address it at all, just smoothly go on. You weren’t doing anything wrong, you would just prefer to wait until you have some privacy, to resume what you were doing.

Another benefit of this is that when you reserve the less attractive parts of your daily life to be done in private, you also have a sense of reserving a little part of yourself. This is not a negative thing. We aren’t talking about not including your husband in your whole life, just to retain a little bit of yourself. And that helps keep you from being needy. When you have a sense of some part of your life being private, you respect yourself a bit more. This is true with more than husbands. It also holds for friendships with other girls. Hold a little back, even if it is just plucking your eyebrows and swishing out the toilet. Besides, with girlfriends, when you do get together for a girls night in and you are painting your nails and doing facials, it makes it all the more special because those are not things you take for granted.

You might choose to keep a few other things private too, such as not talking about getting a dress, new lingerie, new shoes, new nail polish, or whatever (if you are married, you shouldn’t hide the fact that you spent money, but being upfront about the finances is different than modeling your new blouse). The reason goes back the mystery of not knowing what goes into the final product. There is so much more feminine mystery to showing up in a dress that your husband has never seen before, than displaying it on the hanger and talking about it in excited tones. You seem so much sexier if you wear some lacy thing to bed that he has never seen, than if he knew about it before. This is because if he knows you bought it, in his mind it is something you have, something separate from you. When it is something you just use, he sees it as a part of you, a part of who you are.

In my spare time I like to write fiction, and one element that you learn in fiction writing is that if you don’t spell out everything, the reader will mentally fill in the details on his own, plus he will be more generous than you would have been. This is the same principle. When you are dating someone, you don’t know every last thing about them. When you see hints of things, you automatically fill in the gaps in your own head. If a man thinks he knows every garment in a woman’s wardrobe, seen all the accessories, he has a “been there, done that” attitude towards her. She is no longer a mystery like she used to be. If she lets him know about every change, every addition, as soon she brings it home, he still always knows everything about her. If she just shows up in things that he’s never seen (and this can extended to other areas of her life), his mind won’t automatically say “okay, now I’ve seen it all again”, it will say “well if I didn’t know about that, what else do I not know about her?” As long as he never has reason to ask that about her morals or her character, that kind of mystery is a very very good thing.

Another way to keep a little mystery about you is to not talk so much. If you are always giving your opinion of everything that catches your attention, eventually he will have heard pretty much everything you have to say on every subject. Being married to you will become like watching the same episode of a TV show over and over and over and over again. After a while, you know every line and you are utterly sick of seeing it. Not only that, but when you get really sick of that episode, you will never be able to really enjoy it again for the rest of your life. That is the last thing you want a person to think about you.

That last point is especially hard for me because I tend babble on endlessly. If I stifle it up too much, I come to resent my husband because I feel like I can’t “be myself”. The key is to step back and remind yourself that you are not closing your mouth because you are trying to become a perfect little silent and submissive servant, but that you are keeping some of your thoughts special and treasured. You must focus on the fact that holding some things back is a way of treating yourself with respect, rather than flinging the entire contents of your mind out there for him (or anybody) to notice or discard as he pleases.

A little unpredictability is very alluring. Knowing everything a person is going to do before they do it is a fast track to finding them boring. Yes, a person should know their spouse’s character inside and out, but if you are constantly surprising him in other areas of your life, he is constantly challenged because he has yet to completely plumb your depths. What this means is that you must always have some little bit of unpredictability about you. Unpredictability is fascinating. It doesn’t have to be big things, just occasionally making a food he’s never had before, taking an afternoon by yourself and going to the theater or a museum that you’ve never been to, wearing a new article of clothing he’s never seen, styling your hair differently, doing some form of exercise you’ve never done, reading about new subjects so you always have new things to talk about, etc.

But don’t just put on a display of unpredictability. Vary your life for your own sake. It is exciting and enriching. Life is change. If you aren’t changing you are dying. And on top of that, develop the habit of discretion so that he gets the impression of more variety and unpredictability than there really is.

There is one secret that will probably do more to make people love you and want to please you, than any other technique. It can completely change your life and how you get along with all the people around you.

You must show appreciation for others.

We humans crave appreciation, we crave that feeling of being noticed and admired and respected. Everybody is the hero their own life, but too often it feels like the rest of the world refuses to pause and acknowledge your abilities, talents, or efforts.

Pretty much everyone feels fundamentally misunderstood. I know I do. I also know that my husband does, my friends do, my kids do, and every teenager I’ve ever met does (unlike teenagers who obsess about how misunderstood they are, grownups handle it better. We still feel the same way, but we don’t compose angst-ridden poetry about it any more).

Of course we’re all misunderstood. If the world really knew how awesome we were, it would be hailing us with accolades every time we did something right and granting understanding every time we made a mistake. Folks out there just don’t seem to know who we are on the inside, or all that would happen of course!

Well whether or not we are as misunderstood as we think we are isn’t the point. The point is that we crave appreciation with the same unquenchable hunger as we crave food and water and air. We’ll jump through hoops to get it, and more importantly for those seeking to become alluring, we love those who give us appreciation.

You probably know what it feels like to work really hard on something and then when you’re done, stand there expecting a thanks or a pat on the back and instead getting…nothing. It might have been at your job, at home with your spouse, or most especially times when you are working to surprise or please someone else. To have your hard work go unnoticed creates a particular feeling inside. Oftentimes that feeling is aimed at someone in particular. Even though thoughts can not kill, I still don’t want those kind of feelings aimed at me. That pretty well evaporates any allurement right there.

On the flip side, when a person gets appreciation, they feel good about themselves. The world is rosy and life feels good. They also tend to connect these wonderful emotions and experiences with the person who did the appreciating. If this pattern repeats itself very many times, the originator of that appreciation becomes liked or loved. Wouldn’t you love a person who is the source of your happiness?

If you want to be loved and thought well of by the people around you, be the source of their happiness.

Appreciation is absolutely free. It costs you nothing more than the five seconds it takes to make a little comment here and there. The effect though, can be like giving a priceless jewel to someone. Can you imagine how popular you would be if you went around each day, giving people expensive gems? Well this is an inexhaustible supply of gems that doesn’t cost you a thing to give out, but reaps the same sort of return love and gratitude.

Go ahead and brainstorm some ways to show appreciation in your daily life right now, and I’ll go into some more detail tomorrow.

One of the biggest reasons that I don’t enjoy drinking water is because I end up going to the bathroom more. I find that annoying. Of the many pleasant activities I can engage in during the day, that is not one of them.

I was greatly heartened to discover that this trait of water drinking is really only a problem at first. Now of course in the long run, you will end up going more often, but it isn’t nearly as bad as it seems it will be when you first increase your water consumption.

You see, all that time you’ve spent dehydrated, your body has been of the opinion that you are trying to live through a drought. It conjured up mental images of water rationing, and you being forced to drink strange bubbly things or black caffeine filled soup due to the tragic water shortage.

Understandably, being a diligent well-meaning body that really wanted to do it’s part, it tried to retain every last precious drop of moisture it could. Of course this presented a storage problem, but it solved that by cheerfully filling up you hands, your ankles, your tummy, and generally every other place it could find, with all it’s horded water. I’m sure you’re very grateful.

So anyway, when you start drinking water by the glassful, a little celebration with fireworks and party hats and confetti occurs inside you now that the drought has ended. Your body can finally relax and release all that stored water because it’s flowing freely again (no pun intended, seriously).

The more water you drink, the more of that retained water from those thick ankles and fat fingers will be released and excreted. Thusly, you will feel like you are running to the little girls’ room every stinking minute. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel moderately better about the whole process to know that the more times I use the restroom, the thinner my hands get.

Seriously though, if you have swollen ankles, hands, tummy, or whatever, the fastest way to get rid of that extra water (and much safer than diuretic pills or other “quick fixes”) is simply to drink and drink and drink some more.

Think of yourself as a sparkling clean pipe through which water flows. To date, you’ve been more of a bucket. Personally I like the pipe idea better. Buckets get yucked up after a while as that water sits there and stagnates.

But what I’m trying to say is that this is temporary and will get better soon. Once all that retained water is gone, what comes out is no more than what you put in, minus the water you lose through you skin and what you are breathing out (which is actually pretty substantial).

Drink like a fish and soon everything will even out and the downsides will disappear while the upsides of a slim body, clear healthy glowing skin, improved health, and increased energy will continue to increase.

When you read about the personal habits of models, people who make their entire living off being beautiful, one habit that they all have in common is that they are fanatical water drinkers. Over and over again you can find hydration listed as one of the non-negotiable set-in-stone laws to being beautiful and heaving healthy skin.

I think the reason that those famous beauties drink so much water is more than just for its weight reduction properties. These are women (and men) who can lose an important job if their skin isn’t spectacular. Also, they are intimately aware that if they don’t preserve that incredible skin, their careers will have the longevity of a shooting star.

What would you do if your entire income, your career future, and your fame hinged on maintaining beautiful skin and a beautiful body? Probably whatever it takes. These are folks with a lot to lose, so they are good teachers for how the rest of us humdrum folks can be beautiful too.

Now I’m not saying that models are the end-all and be-all of health habits, especially since they have to maintain a level of body fat that would make most doctors pale. But let’s do learn from models on the things that they do best: hair, makeup (they do their own), and exceptional skincare. Though if I ran into a model who had been working for more than ten years I’d take a pretty humble attitude towards her health tips too, because you can’t maintain a career in that field for the long-term if you have poor health habits.

Anyway, models and long term beauties swear by hydration as one of their most fundamental techniques for preserving the beauty of their skin.

The French have also long believed in the value of being well hydrated. Seeing as how the country has elevated skin care to an art form, I’m inclined to believe them.

According to Mireille Guiliano in French Women Don’t Get Fat, French children are raised to drink water constantly. Bottles are distributed each morning to each cubicle in the offices and is always on the table at meals. We of course see glasses of water at restaurants, but how many of us put a pitcher out on the table at breakfast, lunch, and dinner at home?

If you think that you have properly hydrated skin simply through moisturizing, you’ll be very disappointed over the next few decades. While moisturizers are an important part of skin care, we can’t absorb enough water through our skin to keep it properly hydrated. Hydration happens from the inside out.

Dehydrated skin looks old and saggy and wrinkled. If you want youthful healthy skin that glows with vitality, you absolute must hydrate it.

After oxygen, water is pretty much the most vital thing you need in life. And most people don’t get enough of it. While the conventional recommendations say you should drink 64 ounces, I really believe that your water needs should be calculated based on your weight, the temperature, and your activity level.

The way I figure it, it seems that your base water consumption should be somewhere around 1 oz. for every 2 pounds of body weight. All you have to do take your weight and multiply it by .5 and you’ll know that base number.

If either it’s really hot, you exercise a lot, work hard physically, are trying to lose weight, or are pregnant (you have an increased blood capacity to support), I think you should be drinking closer to 2 oz for every three pounds of body weight. Multiply your weight by .66 to get the number of oz.

Now these are my recommendations based on things I’ve read, not because I’ve done a scientific study on it. If you have information that would help me revise my numbers, I’d be glad to see it as I believe that proper hydration is one of the biggest components of health and beauty. But I simply don’t accept that my mother-in-law who is 4’11” and probably 105 pounds soaking wet, aught to be drinking the same amount as me (I’m 5’ 7” and I won’t tell you what I weigh, but it’s more than 105).

Developing the water drinking habit is not easy for me as I don’t especially like the stuff. But as I mentioned in that other post, I see such an amazing change in the quality of my health when I’m fully hydrated, that it is worth the effort to continue working on this habit.

Water is a vital key to weight loss, and it’s not just because it fills your stomach so that you aren’t as hungry. Yes you will eat less, as thirst signals often feel like hunger and so by increasing your water intake, you will satisfy those without you taking in unnecessary calories. But there is more to its weight loss effects than that.

Your liver is what metabolizes fat. If your liver isn’t functioning efficiently, the excess fat has to be stored until it can get around to it (read: saddlebags, gut, big bottom, flabby arms that keep waving after you stop, etc).

Your kidneys are what filter out toxins, a process that is vital to keeping your body healthy. If you don’t drink enough water to keep your kidneys flushed out and filtering properly, your liver will set aside a lot of its fat metabolizing, so as to help the kidneys with their filtration. Toxins are poison, so it’s higher on your body’s priority list to get those filtered out and excreted than to process your fat. It’s in your best interest to get those kidneys doing their job by themselves so that your liver can get back to doing what is important to the size of your waistline.

What all that boils down to is that the less water you drink, the more your metabolism will be reduced because your body has more important things to do. If you want to get that metabolism ramped back up to where it’s supposed to be, you have to work with your body and give it all the flushing cleansing water it needs.

In addition, if your muscles are well hydrated, they will perform better, which translates into more calories burned 24 hours a day (again, higher metabolism).

And one more thing, if you are losing weight right now, then all the fat that is dissolving contains toxins that now your body must deal with.

Please please be kind to your body and flush those kidneys with plenty of clean water so that you can excrete all that junk out of your system.

Well I’ve probably saddled you with enough for one day.

Drink, drink, and drink some more. Work with your body and it will function beautifully the way that it was intended to. A vibrant healthy glowing body is an alluring body.

I was going to do a different topic for this first week in the Health and Beauty subject, but this is perhaps my greatest Health and Beauty challenge. I didn’t grow up drinking water (my mother always drank lots of it, but the habit never got passed down to us kids) and I’ve spent years and years now trying to rationalize consuming other beverages instead. I’ve also spent years fighting strange symptoms that I never connected with dehydration. I tend to get dizzy when I stand up too fast, I have no energy at all on hot days, and I get headaches. While these things can be caused by reasons other than dehydration, I’ve found that when I actually stick to drinking my required ounces each day, these symptoms vanish like magic. Not only that, but my body improves in ways I hadn’t even noticed as problems.

Believe it or not, my metabolism speeds up! In fact when I was a teenager and trying desperately (and in many stupid ways) to lose weight, I noticed that if I drank a glass of water, I got hungry very quickly. This really upset me because I was trying to fill my belly with of water to make myself feel full, but I always seemed to eat more when I’d been drinking plenty of water.

In one of those classic I-can’t-believe-I-was-that-stupid moments, I decided that drinking water was hurting the weight loss cause and tried to avoid drinking, as much as possible! It wasn’t until later that I finally realized that water is vitally important in the metabolic process and that my constant dehydration was slowing my metabolism down! Talk about shooting oneself in the foot!

So how much water do you need? Well conventional advice says a minimum of 64 ounces for an average adult (How many of us are the statistical “average adult”?) in conditions not overly dry, hot, or who isn’t engaging in much physical exertion.

Um, yeah. As if that describes my daily life.

I’ve noticed that bodybuilders (who are utterly obsessed with health and tend to be more reliable since they judge results based on physical performance and not on what most effectively sells something) recommend a lot more water than the government health recommendations.

Since you generally aught to work your water intake upwards rather than drowning your poor unsuspecting body, I’d say work towards 64 ounces and then experiment with higher levels and see if your body responds positively.

So how do you manage this impossibly large sounding number of ounces?

Start by picking out a drinking glass that you can comfortably finish in one sitting (I use a 14 ounce glass which is a good bit larger than the recommended 8 ounces, but that is comfortable for me). Then do the math to find out how many of these glasses you need to make up your ounces (when in doubt, round up a glass not down).

Now here comes the easier part.

Drink one glass when you first wake up in the morning (yes, before your coffee) and another last thing before you go to bed. Then all you have to do is make up the glasses in between. I find that I need to drink five glasses a day, so once my morning and nighttime glasses are out of the way, I only need to remember to drink three glasses over the course of the day.

Another useful technique is to have a little pad next to the place where you keep your glass (if you are at home, next to the kitchen sink is ideal). Write a tick mark for each glass you drink and then you can see at a glance how much you need to go. I promise that it’s easier than it sounds.

You should start noticing the benefits of increased hydration within 48 hours (I’m not sarcasticly referring to increased bathroom trips), but the benefits will continue to show up for weeks as it can take that long to become truly hydrated. Just think of taking an old dry sponge and immersing it. It takes a while before it can actually absorb that liquid.

Please don’t put this off until tomorrow, next week, or next month. Start now. Don’t wait until you can start this habit perfectly. Even a glass of two a day is better than nothing.

As Flylady would say: Even drinking water imperfectly still blesses your body.

What if there were a magic elixir that could make your skin beautiful and glowing, could clean your body of all the poisons and toxins it has built up, could take pounds off your body, could increase your health and vigor, could infuse you with new levels of energy, could prevent many illnesses and many of your headaches, and on top of everything else, was completely free. All you have to do is to drink it.

Take a minute and go drink a glass of water. Start the process of flushing your body with this miracle liquid and I’ll tell you more tomorrow.

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This week’s topic: Water, the elixir of life (Health and Beauty)

And don’t forget to continue working on last week’s topic: Living emotionally independent (Living Well)